| And on the other hand, you could have picked two of these up for like $30 around the same time and paid for the Jalpa and still have money left over.
And one more data point, looked at the housing price index (national data, all transactions, no cherry picking here) from the federal housing finance agency.
Index at the end of 1988 was 255.10, end of 2019 it was 636.20, so an increase of 249.39%, which would make that Jalpa investment worth roughly $187904 today.
Now even I don’t buy into that nonsense that a house is an asset, it’s a liability. Even if you own it free and clear there are still taxes, insurance and maintenance. And with the corner cutting building practices in use today, it probably has a useful life of about 30 years. So the average Joe just has it paid off when he has to replace everything again.
While you may not be able to drive your house, not only is it a notionally better investment than your car, it is also more comfortable to sleep in.
Anything else is just spin from someone trying to sell you inventory on their books...
Great analysis, Erik! Let’s have some fun with math using the Jalpa. Car sold for $75345 in 1988. Average price of gold (assuming he wasn’t an insider at Philbro and had zero timing luck) was $436.78, call it 172.5 troy ozs. Today’s close was $1803.55 so $311114.23. S&P return since 1988 was 431.114% and 925.842% without and with dividends reinvested. Call it $324822 and $697575 respectively. Brilliant investment, n’est pas? And that’s before we talk push up bras and torn jeans.
I hope that included a service contract...... And the Lamborghini Jalpa sold for $135,000 Michael Savard (1981 308 GTSi)
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